30 June 2008

My diagnosis of the environmental crisis is that it is essentially a spiritual crisis. We have become utterly lost spiritually, and so we are susceptible to every huckster who comes along promising us wealth, wish fulfillment, escape, adventure and excitement, tons of sex, or whatever our brains happen to be craving.

None of that works. None of that fills the void that we feel, except very temporarily, so we are caught in a perpetual cycle of seeking more. Increasingly, not even traditional religious beliefs fill that void. That became particularly true for me as I saw the major religions at best slow to respond to the degradation of the natural world and at worst blind or indifferent to it. More interested in salvaging a human-centered cosmos than in looking very clearly at what is going on, at what we are doing to this precious Earth. More interested in getting to heaven than in noticing the heaven we already inhabit.

So for me this spiritual crisis requires a radical solution. Meaning, simply, going back to the root. Nothing less will do. We must reclaim the very root, the very deepest foundation of who and what we are.

All the religions are founded on an experience of this root, and then the root has become lost in a forest of beliefs and doctrines and institutional survival mechanisms. Too often, our truth has gone no deeper than belief, and belief is always subject to being contradicted by reality, and therefore threatened by it, and then we become reactive and defensive of our beliefs instead of open to and grounded in reality.

To go to the root means to realize what we truly are. This truth can not be conveyed in words, because words create distinctions and categories, and the truth is inherently indivisible. It must be seen. It must be encountered. It is being lived right now, at all times, within and around us. We only fail to recognize what is staring us in the face all the time. And in that failure we become lost and confused and frightened. We think we are separate, and with that thought we create separation. And then we seek security and comfort anywhere we think we can find it.

"Contemplative Inquiry" is a fancy term for a very simple turning to see what is real, and to let go of all that is superfluous. It is so simple. The only reason it seems hard is that it is not a mind thing. It is not something the mind does. It is bigger than that. It is where the mind comes from, it is what the mind is. The conscious mind doesn't even know the whole mind, doesn't even know why it is doing what it is doing most of the time. All it can do is make up a story that tries to create a feeling of coherence out of that which it does not truly understand. The mind can not even comprehend itself. How can it comprehend the whole movement of reality?

Meanwhile, there is within us and around us all the time, this quiet presence, this deep silence, watching and listening and opening to everything exactly as it is. And this silent presence is our most essential nature.

This silence is mostly unnoticed. Those who notice it by some miracle, often by some terrible loss or grief, usually ignore it in the end, because, after all, it is only silence. Not very interesting. Not like all those promises of more stuff and peak experiences and wealth and knowledge and power!

But those lucky few who attend to silence discover riches beyond imagining. They discover their own true self in absolutely everything that is, in life living itself, all an expression of this deep silence, the still center of all that is.

Being thus filled, they can never be tempted by promises of fulfillment. Being thus emptied, they can never feel threatened by reality.

Be still. Realize the root of all things.

There is a tendency to talk about the need to find a new framing story that will guide us to better behavior, to a better relationship with nature. And while it is true that an old story has wielded tremendous influence -- the mind loves a good story, being itself the great turn-reality-into-story machine -- any story is ultimately a mind-created thing. A story can not therefore describe the living truth.

Nothing can save us now but the living truth. The truth of what actually is right now. Not what we want. Not what we believe. Not what we desire. Not what we crave. Not what we think. Not even what we experience or imagine. What is. What actually is: the one thing we never pay any attention to because it is so simple, and so seemingly uninteresting and unfulfilling. Yet it is the whole of everything. It is superabundance. It is the living truth that the mind can not grasp. And so the mind must learn its true place in the order of things and give up its throne. It resists and resists, like any tyrant. It cajoles and promises like any addict. It is addicted to itself, to its own version of reality.

In the end it surrenders, as it must. And when it does, it finds peace. The peace of knowing what it truly is and where it truly belongs. Each and every one of us must see this living truth for ourselves. No one can give it to us. No belief system can contain it. No institution can mediate it. No guru or teacher can transmit it. No expert can convince us of it. No story can generate it. It is too deeply intimate a thing for any of that. It must be seen for and in one's self and in one's world, or it has no reality and no meaning.

There is tremendous possibility in this, because the solution to the whole thing lies in something that is immediately accessible to every one: it is the one universal truth, irrespective of culture or religion. It lies in our common identity as human animals in a deeply interconnected universe. And, deeper still, in the deep silence that abides within and around and through all that is; the deep well of being; the silent, indivisible one; the still center of us all. The very root.

09 June 2008

We had an amazing experience yesterday aboard The Prince of Whales, which is a whale watch boat operated by Newburyport Whale Watch in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Cynthia and I joined Head Naturalist Dianna Schulte of the Blue Ocean Society to provide educational context on the trip. I have collaborated with Blue Ocean as an educator for the past five or six years.

After sighting a few fin whales in the distance who were spending very little time at the surface, we were suddenly joined by a young humpback, later identified from its fluke pattern as Lutris, which means "otter." Lutris is the six-year-old offspring of Lava. Before we identified him/her, we assumed it was a much younger juvenile, because Lutris spent close to an hour with us, right next to the boat, continuously checking us out, behavior that is more common among younger whales.

Several people who were on the lower deck had the very great honor of being looked in the eye by this magnificent creature. Several times s/he rolled over to bring one large, pink eye out of the water to look at us. For a six-year-old to show this much curiosity and persistence in visiting a bunch of humans on a boat is fairly unusual, and it was a great privilege to be among those visited.

Nearly every one of us on the boat felt an almost irresistible urge to jump into the water. People were hanging over the rails, trying to get as close as possible to Lutris as s/he passed. It felt to me like we were being called home, like it was an intentional communication from Lutris to us, one which we recognized at a deep and unidentifiable level. Something very unusual was going on in this encounter. Something was being communicated, something we all felt, and experienced as an urge to be as close to the whale as possible.

Several times we tried to leave, because our time was running short, but Lutris maneuvered into our path and would not let us go. Lutris was maintaining contact even when we were ready to break it off. It is unavoidable. Lutris was reaching out to us. The only other time I have felt such a clear connection and communication was when we encountered another young humpback who was entangled in fishing gear. That whale's call for help, which we and others were able to provide in the end, was inaudible, but unmistakable. Lutris was not calling for help, but was seemingly making contact.

There is a strange phenomenon that occurs when one is visited by a whale in this way. Afterward, the whole experience slips away like a dream. We spent an hour with Lutris but it felt like minutes. And looking back, it was hard to believe that it was real. To be visited by such a huge wild creature, who is obviously intelligent and aware and purposeful and curious, just doesn't compute in the brain somehow.

That inability truly to process the experience makes it feel a little surreal. But it is very real. It is the honest truth. It makes one realize what a marvelously inadequate thing this little brain is for truly understanding the living world. We are deeply embedded in beauty and wonder, and we hardly even know it. It remains a deep mystery to us. But when one meets a whale, or is met by a whale, in this way, one comes into direct encounter with the limits of the brain's ability to comprehend, and that in itself opens up new horizons of possibility for engaging with this world. It is utterly impossible, in my experience, to go back into the human-dominated world after an experience like this, and feel quite the same way about it.

Clearly, the human is not the be-all and end-all of creation. The human is embedded in a magnificence it can not even comprehend. And the whale is also part of that magnificence, and so is all of life and all of everything. It adds dignity to our lives to see ourselves in this light, and also takes away our pretense of being the best and the brightest of all creatures.

I don't know if it is intentional, but one of the things the whales are doing is putting us in our proper place in the order of things. It is a more humble place, but it is also a more beautiful and happy, and truly majestic place than the self-centered arrogance that has dominated human behavior for the past several thousand years.

01 June 2008

Is there any idea, or any belief, or any concept, or any thought that you can have about life that is more real, or more vital, or more alive than life itself, more alive than being alive? So where would you rather live, in your ideas and beliefs and concepts about Life, or in being alive itself?

For thousands of years, our ideas and thoughts and beliefs and concepts about life have been more real to us than living itself. Our sense of who we are, our identity, has been based more in what we think and what we believe about life than in the simple fact of being alive.

For us to survive now, we must turn and allow ourselves to be embraced fully once again by the simple beauty of being alive and we must allow our ideas and beliefs about Life to recede in importance.

Our obsession with our thoughts makes them chaotic and overwhelming.
They were never meant to carry the burden of telling us who
we really are. That job is too big for them. When we bring the
clear seeing that is grounded in our inner silence to bear,
then we shift our sense of who we really
are, from thought, to silence. From that which can not carry
our true being to that which is our true being, life itself,
being alive, the whole of everything.

I have spent my life asking questions about our place on Earth; working for peace, social justice and environmental conservation; living a contemplative, listening life; and sharing my experiences through writing and education. I have studied the vocal behavior of marine mammals and songbirds. I now devote much of my time to recording natural soundscapes and composing and performing music that is inspired by those soundscapes.
The environmental situation is critical, and solutions are urgently needed that touch the deepest levels of who we think we are, how we view the world, and how our actions mirror those beliefs.